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The Pessimist’s Case Against Trump

May 10, 2016 12:17 pmMay 10, 2016 12:17 pm

I don’t want to lay my case against conservative support for Donald Trump on too thick too soon, since there will be plenty of time to go around and around on the question between here and November. But one issue seems worth highlighting now, because it’s come up repeatedly in conversations with what you might call the Trump-curious among my friends and family and peers. Basically, when you make an argument like the one I made in my Sunday column, to the effect that a President Trump’s likely governing style would raise the risks of national and global instability to an extent that trumps (if you will) many normal ideological concerns, they tend to raise an eyebrow and say, compared to what?

Compared to George W. Bush, who led us into a bloody quagmire in the Middle East and presided over the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Compared to Barack Obama, who’s basically stood by and watched while that same Middle East has gone up in flames, plus Russia’s near-abroad and oh, maybe Europe too? Oh, and since you’re worried about Trump’s character … Compared to Bill Clinton, who possibly bombed foreign countries in order to distract from his sex scandal with an intern?

Here’s a Rod Dreher reader e-mail that gets at a version of this argument; and here’s a tweet from a writer I admire (I highly recommend his essay on the state of science in the latest First Things) that distills it to its essence:

I think I finally get it: all these people freaking out about Trump are in denial about the character & competence of all other politicians.

Now I am rarely accused of pollyannism (an obscure 8th-century Christian heresy, I believe), and I don’t usually think of myself as someone who holds our ruling class in particularly high regard. But the Trump phenomenon has exposed an important dividing line within what you might call the pessimism-based community: Pessimists all look at the governance of the West and think, well, this is pretty bad, but we don’t all agree on how and whether and how easily it could get much, much worse.

In my own case, because I tend to see Western society as stuck in a decadent loop rather than on the skids toward total calamity, I also tend to give our elites some credit for not being total calamities themselves, and I tend to see movements like Trumpism that promise Total Disruption as offering a cure worse than the disease. Whereas some of my more declinist friends (perhaps including this Trump delegate …?) are more Trump-curious because they think the disease is further advanced, that calamity looms no matter what, or that — see above — under Bush and Obama it has already come upon us.

This is not a disagreement that can be adjudicated perfectly, since it requires comparing our existing politicians, many of whom are indeed venal and incompetent, to an entirely hypothetical Trump era. But provisionally I would invite the Trump-curious to think about the two signal crises of the Bush years, 9/11 and the financial crisis, and imagine each one with Donald Trump installed as president of the United States.

In the first instance, you can imagine a better outcome than the one we had: Perhaps Trump’s (alleged) skepticism about the Iraq War and zeal for “winning” would have manifested itself in a more restrained and tightly-focused post-9/11 response, perhaps we would have caught or killed Bin Laden sooner and brought our troops home in a victory parade, perhaps phrases like “Abu Ghraib” and “waterboarding” would have never entered our national lexicon.

But remembering the post-9/11 atmosphere (and, indeed, my own psychic state at the time), it also seems very easy to imagine a response that was much, much worse — more reckless, more bloodthirsty, more extra-constitutional, and ultimately more disastrous for our military, the innocent, the world.

Recall, especially, that for all the talk at the time and after about Bush’s fascism, etc., the Bush administration spent a lot of time trying to tamp down backlash at home (mosque visits, yes; internment camps, no) and working within institutional frameworks that imposed some limits on its actions. Both of its wars (unlike our Obama-era adventures) were debated and approved by Congress, a great deal of time was spent trying to work through the United Nations, the invasion of Iraq was a coalition effort even if it was only of the “willing,” High Cheneyism was pressed by one faction of the executive branch but resisted by others, and so on.

None of this prevented the war from being a mistake and then a debacle, and if you’re preparing an indictment of the American governing class the fact that so many centrists and reasonable liberals went along with the Bush administration’s case for war can be invoked in a case for disruption, a case for #TrumpNow. (As can the fact that many #NeverTrump voices on the right seem not to have reckoned fully with what Bushism wrought.)

But it’s also pretty easy, especially given some of the precedents created by President Obama’s foreign forays and drone wars, to imagine how a future American president might respond to a 9/11-style attack by ignoring institutional restraints entirely, and simply lashing out with blood and fire. Especially if that American president had, I dunno, explicitly campaigned on promises to “kill them and take the oil,” to murder terrorist families, to disfavor and discriminate against Muslims as a class during a time of terror, etc. Which is why, in the end, a rigorous case for Trump needs to be very comfortable with that possibility (as some of his supporters are!), comfortable with fire and blood as an alternative to George W. Bush’s far-too-timid crawl to war and overlawyered “enhanced interrogations,” rather than assuming because Bush’s foreign policy went bad a far higher degree of recklessness and folly isn’t possible.

Then regarding the financial crisis — well, there my take is a lot shorter. No doubt the Bush administration (and the Clinton administration before it) made mistakes that made the crisis worse when it came; no doubt the Washington-New York response was imperfect and created all kinds of problems down the road. But to believe that the aftermath of Lehman’s collapse couldn’t have been much bleaker with a more feckless and volatile president at the helm and a more hackish cast around him, that the Bush administration’s response was the worst of all possible options rather than among the least-bad, requires ignoring a lot of very dark economic history that we were lucky not to actually revisit. There is some chance that America and the world would have been better off had Donald Trump been president on 9/11 rather than Bush. But the chances that we would have been better off in 2008, 2009 and 2010 (and into the present) drop very low indeed.

I’ll leave off there, while noting that I’ve made an earlier version of this argument that touches on the immigration issue as well. Again, we’ll have plenty of time to wrestle with these questions over the next six months. But in the pessimist community generally, and the world of dissident, anti-Bush conservatives especially, this strikes me as the core problem that need to be reckoned with by anyone who wants to make a strong case for supporting Donald Trump for the sake of #disrupting our decadent elite. It’s not enough to note that things are bad now, that our bipartisan leaders — and especially the Republican Party’s leaders — have often marched with folly. You need to address head-on the ways in which a President Trump seems like a man whose instincts, inclinations and explicit promises could make that march of folly ever so much swifter, ever so much worse.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.